


the dead man's float

by misandrywitch



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, References to Shakespeare, or the strong misuse of, spoilers: you're dead, spoilers: you're not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-24 19:53:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17710529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: “It was poetic, if a little heavy-handed. A tragic hero’s death.”“I’m not,” James says. “A tragic hero.”“I know,” I say. When I stand, he follows me.





	the dead man's float

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "exit, pursued" by dalton day - a terrific little poem called "a one-act play in which we float facedown in the center of a lake, a position known as the dead man's float." 
> 
> emerges out of the ether on this ao3 account 2 years later with some weird if we were villains fic in first person, drinking a margarita: sup gays
> 
> i'm at junosteeled.tumblr.com as always

 

 

 

 

 

 _Enter:_ OLIVER. An everyman. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am sitting on a beach.

It is remarkable to note this because it has been years since I’ve sat on a beach, and one might think after everything I might never want to sit on one again. But here I am, anyway. Overdressed for the weather, I remove my shoes and roll pant legs up so I can dig my bare feet and ankles in the sand. It prickles almost painfully. The late evening sun is still warm on my neck, and children laugh and shriek nearby.

It is not the right scene for this, but it hardly matters - I am an ill-suited protagonist. Right now, I am waiting in the wings.

I wait for two hours, until the sun goes down. I brought a book along, something stolen from Meredith’s bedside table, but I find I don’t have any interest in reading it. The water is blue and wide. I think about a car left on a stretch of freezing beachfront, and words chanted idly towards the sky, _What I have been I have forgot to know;_

Nobody bothers me because I am entirely unremarkable, a man overdressed for the weather staring at the ocean.

Until somebody does.

I hear footsteps before the sharp intake of breath, a moment to fortify before he steps onstage. I don’t turn to look at him as he speaks.

 

“ _And thou by some incensed god sent hither_

_To make the world to laugh at me.”_

 

“For God’s sake,” I say. “Be yourself, won’t you? I can read _Pericles_ whenever I want.”

There are footsteps, and someone sits in the sand to my right. My heart is wild and heavy. My fingers can’t stay still.

“Oliver,” James says, slowly, firmly, the way he always had. I turn to look at him, and there he is.

Did I remember right how is voice catches, on my name? The color of his eyes and the fine lines of his face? Age sits there in a way that seems uncomfortable - lines around his mouth I don’t remember, shadows under his eyes I don’t recognize. He is still boyish, at the same time that he looks one hundred years old.

“Hello,” I say, and “James,” I say, because there is nothing else to be said. “That’s really what you wanted to go with?”

“ _Romeo and Juliet_ felt presumptive,” James says. Now that I’ve looked away from him I cannot stop looking at the shape his mouth makes, the tightness around his eyes and his bony, graceful hands. He passes one thumb over the other, flexes his long wrist. I dig my fingers into the sand. “ _Twelfth Night_ not thematically appropriate. I was going to do _Hamlet,_ actually, but I panicked.”

I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter, because it’s his voice saying it. “I would have preferred _Hamlet,_ ” I say, instead. “I can, you know, tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly.”

“I wasn’t sure if you would come,” James says. Guilt or something like it makes his face ugly.

“Don’t be stupid. It doesn’t suit you.” James knew exactly what I was going to do. As soon as I’d realized the truth hidden in his letter, I’d known that second, fundamental one.

“It wasn’t meant to be presumptive.”

“Why?” I ask, sheer curiosity. “What would you have done if I hadn’t come?”

“I’ve been scouring the beachfront every day for the last two months,” James says, and his eyes shift from my face to the ocean and back. “I was beginning to wonder the same thing. Viola, maybe, or Hermione.”

 

“ _And all those sayings will I overswear;_

_And those swearings keep as true in soul_

_As doth that orbed continent the fire_

_That severs day from night.”_

 

“Something like that,” James says.

“I’ve come because I wanted to,” I say, and when James meets my eyes they do not waver. I’ve sat a long time with this - years - and there is nothing inside myself in how I feel about him that scares me anymore. What I see on his face doesn’t frighten me, or embarrass me, or surprise me. It used to. But not now. “And because I had to know the answer. I had to. It’s not more complicated than that.”

“Yes it is,” James says, and a sudden rush of emotion overwhelms his face. He moves forward in one sharp moment and his fingers circle my wrist. It hurts for a moment, and then it doesn’t. My heart is in my throat. “Because I lied.”

“That’s not new either.”

“Did you think it was true?” James’s voice wavers for the first time. “The others do.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “For a minute.”

“I’m sorry,” James says, which is so strange and ludicrous that I laugh, unexpectedly. It bursts out of me. He looks alarmed, and he doesn’t move his hand.

“Don’t be,” I say. “It was poetic, if a little heavy-handed. A tragic hero’s death.”

“I’m not,” James says. “A tragic hero.”

“I know,” I say. When I stand, he follows me. The sun has long since gone down. In the dark, the ocean feels very close. I slide my feet back into my shoes, and when James turns from the water I am only a step behind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _Enter:_ JAMES FARROW, or a man who used to bear that name. 

 

It is possible to find yourself miscast in the role your life gives to you. In fact, I think it’s the most likely thing in the world and the only real irony occurs when you’ve realized that it’s happened, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

I mean - that’s what I’ve taken to telling myself, anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 _Setting:_ A room, nondescript. It could be anywhere at all and it could belong to anyone. It's defining features are the shelves full of booksand THE BED in one corner. 

 

“How’s Meredith?” James asks, as he knocks open the screen door to the tiny building he’s lead us to. This strikes me as being more vindictive than necessary, or perhaps just to the point. The more things change, I think, the more they seem to be retreading old patterns. There’s an edge to his voice and I would still follow him anywhere.

“She’s fine,” I say. “She’s doing well for herself.” I look around the room, which is small and dark and probably rented. I don’t think dead men pay mortgages. It’s crammed with books, an unmade bed. Outside, I hear the distant sounds of traffic, the wind on the screen door. The sounds of the sea.

“I’ve seen her show,” James says, and his voice is wry.

“So have I. They used to play it in the common room. You know, in prison.” That is unnecessarily vindictive, but I don’t care. I want him to know my words have an edge to them, now.

“She kept visiting you.” Not a question.

“She did.”

“And she didn’t tell you what I’d done.”

He hadn’t done anything. That’s why I’m here.

“She did not. Not right away.” I could blame her for that, but I don’t. I understand Meredith, and I can’t fault her for thinking poorly of James even though I don’t.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t understand it,” James says, softly. He removes his shoes and his jacket, closes the door and pulls open the window blinds like a habit. Like we’re still sharing the same space. I can’t take my eyes off of him. His elegant hands turn over and over each other. “I was beginning to think I had done something I couldn’t take back.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You’re one to talk.”

That makes me laugh, a little. We’re discussing his death, and what led to it, like you’d discuss the weather. He smiles at me from across the room. My mind can’t add the the two up. The finality of what I’d been sure I’d known, and the desperation to find something - anything to prove myself wrong. And this - James, smiling at me with his back against the door like he’d done a thousand times before. Like he’d never done before this moment.

I want to memorize the new shadows around his eyes, the way I have the familiar line of his nose and the timbre of his voice in iambic pentameter. I cannot stop looking. I would be happy just to look at him, until he turns away. That’s all I’d wanted. To be sure.

He doesn’t turn away.

“I would have told you,” James says, seriously. Always serious, even now. Somehow I thought death might have lended him some levity.

“About Richard?” That does make me laugh. “No you wouldn’t have.”

“Not about Richard,” James says, stubborn. “About - “ and he falters. Words fail him, and he moves his hand in the space between us which makes me move forward, close the gap between us. I can feel my heartbeat in that space, in my own ears and in the long stretch of ten years.

He moves his hand again, from his chest to mine. The gesture is elegant and futile. It makes me think of a bird, or a shadow. It also makes me afraid, because I am so sure that he doesn’t have the words for it, or that he’s going to borrow somebody else’s.

“You,” James says finally, softly. “And - me.”

“No,” I say, and I step closer. “You wouldn’t have.” That isn’t a condemnation. It’s a fact. I’ve thought about this a lot, over the course of ten years. When you know the very worst thing about someone, there isn’t any other judgment to pass. There isn’t anything else to know.

I wonder if James knows the best worst thing about me.

He does, though. Of course he does. That’s why I did it.

“I want you to tell me the story,” James says. A demand, not a question. “How you see it.”

I think about it. For a long time, I think about it. I consider the story that I told Colborne, which is as close to a truth based in facts as I can provide. But that isn’t the right answer, because James knows that story. James told it to me himself.

“I didn’t come here to tell you stories,” I say. Then, I step forward, and he steps forward, and his mouth is on mine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

We're too close, too fast, and neither of us know what we're doing. That's okay, until it isn't, and when you read about it, it's always poetic but in real life it's just awkward. A lot of things don't live up to the Bard's approximation of them - and I would know. Not very many people can say they've lived through a murder, a case of mistaken identity, lost love. 

James can't take my shirt off fast enough, but once he does he has no idea what to do with his hands. I can't seem to make mine stop shaking. I want to be everywhere and so, for a moment, I am nowhere, overwhelmed by the prospect and by James Farrow's tongue in my mouth. I want to tell him to slow down. I want to pull him to pieces. I have no idea how to get started. 

Nevertheless, we make do. 

James stares up at me, and it's not an expression I know. He looks a little like he's seeing a ghost. I think about Hamlet, and unexpected figures in a garden, which isn't what I want to be thinking of at all. Oh, prophetic soul. I want to tell James that it isn't fair, that he's the one who's dead after all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sun is all but gone as the night descended, and James won’t look me in the eye. I study his bare shoulder as he turns away from me on the unmade bed. I can see, in the shadow, his ribs shifting under the skin. I haven’t gotten any better at this, knowing the right thing to say when silence falls.

 I can't help but consider how the whole thing feels anticlimactic. 

"Don't be obscene," James says, which strikes me as hilarious considering I can still taste him, on my lower lip. 

"Prison gave me a sense of humor."

"Oliver, Jesus." His shoulders are tense and militant, and I'm certain that I've done something wrong, somehow. I've never been any good at sex, at the specifics of it or the conception, and the fear rises in me that this was all a terrible mistake. It's easy  to let your world revolve around an invisible certainty. That's what he was, for so many years, a litany of memories. I remember how it felt to wake up next to him, in the bed in my parents' house. I remember how much it had hurt when he'd stopped coming to see me. 

But - his mouth, his hands. No, it wasn't a mistake. I had to know. Orpheus and I understand each other. 

"What is it?" 

"Why do you joke about that?" He barks it out, accusatory. 

"The same reason anyone jokes about anything." 

"I wish you wouldn't."

"I don't plan to just lay here in silence, James." 

"I rather expected you to go." 

"Go?" Go where.

"Back." To Meredith. To how things were. I'm not sure. 

"I think you need to temper your expectations," I say. 

James stands, flinging the blanket aside. It hits the headboard with a sad thump and he glares at it, and at the wall, and at his own bare feet. 

"I came an awful long way for a quick tryst with a ghost," I offer. James glares harder, his handsome face frustrated, unpleasant with anger. 

"I wish you'd stop saying that too."

"Why? You did it. Is that not supposed to be funny either?" 

"No!" Compact and bare-shouldered, he paces across the little room like he's learning lines, chewing over the dialogue. This is an energy I don't recognize in him, a sullen, internal fury directed at nobody but himself. It dawns on me that I've never seen it before because he developed it when he stopped coming to visit me. 

Ten years feels like an impossible ocean - of time, of words, of distance. I've wasted enough of all of those. 

“You want me to be mad at you?" I push the blanket off of my own legs, which makes me realize how cold the room is. I push it down. I feel profoundly self-conscious but I push that down too. I also shove back the urge to just yank the coverlet over my head like a shroud and thrash around naked and scream, like King Lear. 

“Yes,” James snaps.

“You - want me to not speak to you? To leave?”

“No.” Sullenly. Childishly.

“Then - you want me to yell at you.”

“Don’t you want to?” There’s an edge of desperation in his voice, and confusion.

“I guess I can,” I say, “if it’ll help.” I ought to put some pants on first.

“Not if you don’t mean it,” James is growing more irate and I’m getting tired of this, of his own self-loathing.

“How would you know? I am still an actor.” I suppose I still have the right to call myself that. Some things in your heart don't change, even with time. 

“For fucks sake, Oliver,” James says. “You’re supposed to be angry with me, you’re supposed to - “

I stare at him. He paces. His eyes won’t settle. They move from my face to his hands to the window.

“Am I!” I say. “And you’d know, I suppose, how I’m supposed to feel. For my monologue - “

“For fuck’s sake!”

“So, I’m angry, right? At you. What’s my motivation?”

“You spent ten years,” James’s voice catches on the words, “in prison.”

“Right,” I say. I start to pace the length of the room, mocking, and his eyes follow me. At least he stops moving. “But, you know. I did that, didn’t I? What’s my motivation?”

“I broke your nose,” his voice wavers more.

“Oh, I was angry about that. Alright. That’s a great starting point. Now, let’s give it some depth.”

“You’re not listening to me - “

“You’re a coward,” I say. I yell it, really. I project it, with force and air behind my words. James freezes midsentence, midthought. It was a joke, but now it isn't and I feel my own anger snap into place just like that. James is a transfixed audience, a crowd of one. I can see the sea of them stretching out in front of me, waiting for my next word, and I am the center of attention. It doesn't feel novel anymore, being the center of anything. Really, it's rather overrated. 

“You are," I say, powerful and concise, "and you always were. You hid behind the brutality of what you did, and behind my feelings for you, and behind your own jealousy. And to send me a letter - “ My blood is behind it now, and I am angry, truly, just a little. “If you’d wanted forgiveness you could have asked for it. If you wanted me to find you, you could have invited me. I’d have done anything for you. I did. And now you want me to be angry? To push you away? Good luck. We all have to live with our choices. Even you.”

When I’m finished I have to catch my breath. “And scene,” I say, icy, and I mock a bow. Applause from the wings. The audience throws flowers. 

“That didn’t make me feel any better,” James says, finally. He sounds exhausted.

“I’m hardly surprised.” I sigh. I do cross the room and pull my pants on. I don’t look back over my shoulder at him, but I want to. “If you make us some dinner, we can call it even.”

“Call it even for ten years in prison?” James splutters.

I shrug. “I ate a lot of bad food.”

“Don’t you think that’s - and this, in general - is, kind of fucked up?”

“Oh, entirely,” I say, and cross into the other room so he’s forced to follow me. He does, and then he's two steps ahead. He always was two steps ahead until he wasn't, at all, because I jumped without telling him I was going to do so. He blocks my path, one hand on my collarbone. He looks up at me. 

"You don't see a problem with that," James says. A statement, not a question. We've exchanged many of those, today, stating each others' feelings rather than asking after them as if we know the answers before we say them. We do know the answers, before we say them. 

"If I did I wouldn't have come," I say. 

"There's always a moment, in the narrative," James falters. His eyes find the floor instead of my face, and I can see the pulse move in his temple. I want to put my mouth there, on his pulse. "Where the hero has a choice. Ordeal or reward. Move forward or turn back." 

I catch his face in my hands. 

"I'm not a hero," I say. "And I think you're misremembering the hero's journey, anyway. I'm pretty sure there's a moment of revelation, in there, not a moment of choice. The suffering's non-negotiable." 

"Oliver," James says, and his voice is warm and fragile, like I've never heard it before. Oh, what's in a name? 

"Say that again," I say. I kiss him, right under the right eye where his delicate cheekbone meets his dark lashes. 

"Oliver," James says, again. A whisper, but that's all I've ever wanted. 

This time, he follows where I lead and he doesn't hesitate. 

 There's a kind of miracle in experiencing something you've wondered about for a very long time. It answers questions, the way a good twist to a plot might. 

Ah, so that's what I've been missing. I trace the line of James's eyebrows with my fingers, and I touch the shadows under his eyes and I watch how my own pulse races when he puts his hand over my hand, my hip, my heart. 

 He says my name into my mouth, slow and wanting, and I swallow it. I take it as recompense, and I'm sure, at least for a moment, that I've earned it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_The Final Act_

Was it worth it? 

That isn't any of your business. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

  

 

 

 

 

 

“It isn’t as hard as you think,” James says.

I feel the shape of the worlds rather than hear them, formed as his mouth moves against my shoulder. “To end your own story and start another one. I always loved Shakespeare’s endings. Particularly the tragedies.”

“What do you mean?” But I know what he’s going to say. It feels inevitable. James kept two secrets from me, in our lives, and I know both of them now. I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to keep something from me again.

“You can do it too. Disappear, I mean. Think about it. You can disappear, and we can leave this all behind. Start fresh. Close the curtain on the tragedy and make something new."

“It’s not difficult when you’ve done it once?” I ask.

“That’s unkind,” James says, without any fire.

I turn over to look at him. His hair is black ink in shadow, and his eyes are clear. I run my hand along his jawline, because I can. Because, for a minute, I thought I’d never have the chance.

“It isn’t a bad story,” I say. “With the right dramatic beats it could even be a good one.”

“I trust your expertise on that,” James says. His voice is steady but his eyes are suddenly uncertain. He has no idea, I realize, what I am going to say next.

I think about it. I do. I turn the idea over in my mind, like you turn a secret over inside yourself until the edges become smooth. It doesn’t need much turning. The idea fits in my head the way the best ideas do, the ones backed by certainty. Like a confession. Or a murder.

Write an ending, to Oliver Marks. Close off the plotline of a life of bad decisions and squandered talent, steeped in blood and regret. And find something new, a false name in a new direction. Somewhere far from here. On a beach, maybe. Somewhere with sunrises, and books, and James’s jawline.

It would be easy. To escape the specifics of who we are, our pasts and our regret, and wear the lives of two completely different people. In a way, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. We’ve trained our whole lives for this. It’s the only thing we, really, know how to do.

All the world’s a stage, someone said once. And every exit is an entrance somewhere else.

And then I think of my sister, and her anger. I think of Pippa, and her stalwart company in spite of everything, visiting every two weeks for ten years. I think of Colborne, and how I lied to him and told the truth. And I think of the color of Meredith’s hair, and her lips on my forehead, her way of saying goodbye without speaking as she left.

“That depends,” I say, slowly, “on if this is an ending or not.”

James frowns.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t hide from the damage. You only hope you can weather the aftershocks.

“Tell me the story,” he says, again, “how you see it.”

This time, I know the answer.

“Someone I love was afraid. Someone I love did something he couldn’t take back. I wanted to help, and he let me.”

James’s eyes are so sad, and so alive. So is his pulse, when I put my thumb against the skin of his wrist, and his breath, when I put my mouth at the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that I never offer him an answer to his question.

 

 

 

 

_Exeunt_

  
 


End file.
